


Daughter of None

by Curator_of_Curiosity



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Found Family, Gen, Orphan Rey (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 17:03:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20439467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curator_of_Curiosity/pseuds/Curator_of_Curiosity
Summary: Rey remembers her family, but only a little.





	Daughter of None

“They were nobody,” Rey had said.  
Kylo had responded as if he were continuing her thought. “They were filthy junk traders who sold you for drinking money.”  
But Rey remembered her parents, even if just a little. At least, she had a few dreamlike memories of hearing her mother singing in a tender, smoky voice as she held her on her knee. She didn’t remember much else beyond that, not even of her mother’s face, but for a while that was enough for her, even if she didn’t remember a single lyric of the lullaby.  
Sometimes, when she was on Jakku as a little girl, she would wake up thinking she heard her mother’s voice, carried by the wind. She’d open her eyes, but her mother wouldn’t be there. There would only be the groaning of the AT-AT’s metal lining groaning as she moved. She was alone.  
She was always alone.

She had faint memories of stories told by… someone. A father? A grandfather? A friend? She didn’t recall how she knew him, but she could hear his voice.  
_“You have a certain presence, little one,”_ the voice said, _“A distinct presence… so very much like his…”_  
Rey didn’t remember any male relatives in her life, let alone having any relatives at all except for her mother, but whenever she perched herself on the foot of her AT-AT and as night breeze blew across the sand, drawing wave-like patterns in it, she would study the stars and think of him, her mother, and all of them. Did she have siblings? Did she have cousins? She didn’t know, but it would be nice to have someone else to play with. Someone who wouldn’t be gone when their transport left for somewhere cleaner and safer, never to be seen again. Someone whose mother wouldn’t drag them away from her, scolding them the whole while for playing with a dirty desert orphan.  
_I won’t be alone for long,_ she told herself. They were there, somewhere, on a planet circling one or two of those stars. They’d be back for her soon. She could feel it.  
But it seemed they’d decided to take their time on coming to take her home.

  
By the time she was fifteen, Rey had figured out early how to get what she wanted from creatures with weaker minds with the wave of a hand and a few words. It took a few tries, but she could do this well enough to survive. Mostly it was to keep skittermice away from her rations. A few times, she had used her abilities to convince a steelpecker bird to let go of the scrap it was guarding.  
Even then, she had known this was the Force, and she worked it into her daydreams.  
_Was my father a jedi?_ She wondered. _Or was my grandfather? Or my uncle?_ One of them must have been, she’d decided.

  
Luke seemed persistent that he didn’t know her. Once or twice, though, she saw him look at her almost as if he knew her. Almost, not quite. As if he saw something in Rey’s eyes or felt something in her spirit. _Maybe,_ she thought, _maybe this is the man I’ve heard about in my memories._ But she couldn’t feel his presence in the Force. It was as if he was dead, just a ghost wandering around Ahch-To. It sent a chill through her every time she thought about it for too long.  
At night, she didn’t dream anymore—instead of sleeping, she would lay her head down at night, blink, and suddenly it would be morning—and she couldn’t bring herself to daydream, at least not about her family.  
The closest thing she had to a dream on that planet was her vision in the cave and that… that was something she didn’t want to think about. But after that day, it was all she could see when she closed her eyes—a mirrored version of herself, stretching out endlessly and forever, forward and backwards through space. There was no one else but her in the whole line, perhaps because there never was anyone else. Perhaps she really was always alone.  
Did she have a beginning? If she looked back far enough, would anyone be there? Would she have an end? Would someone be there for that? Or would she die just as alone as she began?  
Rey didn’t sleep at night after that. Instead, she would climb out on the black, angular rocks that stretched upwards to watch the sky. Wrapped in a roughly-woven blanket of porg feathers as the sea wind blew in her face and the salt stung her eyes, she stared up at the black sky and looked out at the billions of nameless stars spread out across the oblivion.  
Why did there have to be so many?

  
If Luke really did recognize her, whether by presence or by sight, he never told her. Leia never did either, but then, Rey was always afraid to ask her.

  
Finn remembered even less about his family than Rey remembered about hers. She asked him once, when they were on the _Falcon_, headed to Force-knew-where, if he ever thought about his family.  
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about them, though. I wish I did. It’d be nice to know if I’m anything like them.”  
Rey had never thought of herself as lucky for growing up with fragments of memories and a half-remembered lullaby, but now? Perhaps she was lucky, in a way.  
“Do you ever wonder what happened to them?” she asked.  
Finn nodded. “All the time.” After a while, he said, “But I have Poe. I have Rose. I have BB-8 and Chewie and Leia…” He smiled a little. “And I have you.”  
Rey paused a little. “…We’re family?”  
“Of course we are.” Finn furrowed his brow. “I mean, you think so too, right?”  
“Oh, of course!” Rey had said.  
But in truth, she’d never thought about having a family that wasn’t her family in anything more than name, maybe because no one had ever liked her that much, or had ever stayed beside her long enough for her to think of them as such. But now… Maybe Finn was right.

Once, another night on the Falcon, while most everyone else was asleep except for Rey and BB, as she petted his cold metal dome, she found herself humming her mother’s soft, lilting lullaby.  
Poe opened his eyes and looked up with a face like he’d seen a ghost.  
Rey started to apologize. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake—”  
“No, no, no, it’s fine,” he said, “I just… where did you hear that?”  
Rey didn’t answer for a little while. “My… my mother used to sing it. Why? Do you know it?”  
“Some of it,” said Poe. “I knew someone a long time ago who used to hum that song.”  
“Who?” Rey asked.  
“Another pilot. Her name was Tavar,” said Poe. “She never told me her last name. I don’t think I ever told her mine.”  
“What planet was she from?”  
Poe shook his head. “She never said. I never got to know her that well.” He paused and swallowed. “She, um… she died not long after I met her.”  
“…Oh.” Rey’s voice came out like a soft thud.  
“I’m sorry,” said Poe. “Finn told me about your family. I wish I knew more.”  
Rey nodded. “It’s okay.”  
For a long while afterwards, as she looked out the front of the _Falcon_, Rey wondered if that woman was a relative of hers.

  
Months after the Battle of Crait, the Resistance made camp on an Outer Rim world. Not in the old base, but in another cave tucked away within the rainforest. Not a natural cave either, though the architect had taken great pains to make it look natural—somebody had tunneled into the side of the mountainside, leaving behind a weblike network of rooms and hallways. It was dark there, far too dark to see without lanterns, and it smelled musty. The walls were carved with symbols, but vines and roots had long since overtaken them and eroded away whatever meaning they’d had. Rey took it upon herself to explore the cave system. She borrowed Poe’s lantern and wandered deeper and deeper into the tunnels, sweat dripping down her face.  
One of the rooms she found was a great star-map, stretching across the ceiling and onto the floor. The stars were tiny crystals, each one colored blue or green, or white, embedded into the rock. A few were not one star, but two stars stuck so close together they looked like a single. The name of each system was scratched into the rock, but the names were so worn, Rey couldn’t read any of them.  
Maybe she was born circling one of these stars or star-sets. Maybe she was born traveling between them.  
Rey traced her fingers over a small, green crystal hidden deep within the wall. Only a few letters were still legible. As she ran a finger over what was left of the other letters, she could hear the voice in her head again, the voice of the unnamed father-grandfather-friend, speaking to her again—_“You have a certain presence, little one… A distinct presence… so very much like his…”_  
She remembered the sleepless nights she spent on Ahch-To looking out at the stars—_Force, there were so many_—and turned them over in her mind beside her nights on Jakku as a child—_They could be anywhere!_  
Then Rey smiled a little when she thought of Finn and what he said—_“Don’t you think we’re a family?”_  
_In a way,_ she thought, _I did find them._

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to write Rey Kenobi, but this happened instead.


End file.
